Creative Commons expands to Croatia with Multimedia Institute (mi2)

Matt Haughey, February 26th, 2004

Multimedia Institute (mi2) will lead the license translation and work to expand global access to Croatia’s culture

Palo Alto, USA, and Zagreb, CROATIA – Creative Commons, a nonprofit dedicated to building a body of creative works free for copying and re-use, announced today that it would expand its International Commons (iCommons) project to Croatia. Multimedia Institute (mi2), in Zagreb, will lead the effort.

“Croatia has already demonstrated an extraordinary range of creative
use of new technology,” said Lawrence Lessig, Chairman of Creative Commons and professor of law at Stanford. “We’re eager to work with iCommons
Croatia to support that work.”

“It’s liberating for Croatia to participate in this global effort to create a common space for creativity, especially at a time when legislative regimes often overlook this public good,” said Diana Kovacevic, project lead.

First announced in March 2003, iCommons is Creative Commons’ project to make its machine-readable copyright licenses useful worldwide. As the lead institution, (mi2) will coordinate a public effort literally and legally to translate the Creative Commons licenses for use in Croatia. (mi2) will field comments on an archived email discussion at the Creative Commons website, http://www.creativecommons.org/discuss#croatia.

A nonprofit corporation, Creative Commons promotes the creative re-use of intellectual works, whether owned or in the public domain. It is sustained by the generous support of The Center for the Public Domain, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Hewlett Foundation. Creative Commons is based at Stanford Law School, where it shares staff, space, and inspiration with the school’s Center for Internet and Society.

(mi2) sprang up in 1999 as a spin-off of the Internet program of Open Society Institute Croatia. Entering locally uncharted territory between social and cultural action and new technological developments, (mi2) brought together an emerging generation of civil activists, media practitioners, urban culture actors and social and media theorists who set out to pursue two principle tasks:

1) To promote and educate in media and technological practices relevant for the functioning and development of a social and cultural sector, and

2) To promote and develop socially inflected approaches to new technologies, especially as investments in the local emerging market gradually increased the penetration of new media and introduced the domination of commercial standards.

Over the past two years, (mi2) has become increasingly involved in cooperative activities at the local, regional and international levels to strengthen the cultural scene and advocate on behalf of the public domain. It is working towards initiating structural changes in a wide range of areas, including: non-institutional culture, informal education, technology, intellectual property rights, and access to public resources.